Punjab: Students have cleared JEE, teachers have not yet got regular jobs

Punjab: Education Minister Harjot Bains had recently lauded the achievement of 261 students from government schools who have cleared the prestigious JEE Mains exam this year. Recognising their achievement, the minister had called it a ‘proof’ of the quality of education in Punjab’s government schools. At the press meet, Bains had also announced a summer camp in SAS Nagar for free JEE Advanced coaching to these students. Notably, out of the total students who cleared JEE Mains, 231 were from meritorious schools. Established in 2014, the nine meritorious schools in the state have been providing free education to students from economically weaker families, besides offering residential programmes. A student needs to score more than 80% marks to get admission in the schools through a centralised process. While the schools have now become hotspots of academically talented students, teachers, who are the backbone of these institutions, have been struggling to regularise their services for the past 10 years. These teachers, recruited after clearing the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) and with dual master’s degrees, were promised regularisation in 2015. Ten years later, they are still protesting, burning effigies and staging dharnas to ensure that their students clear the JEE, NEET and other competitive exams.

“We have been promised regularisation time and again and successive governments have let us down,” said Roop Lal, a commerce teacher at Meritorious School, Amritsar. Six students from the school are among the 261 students who cleared the JEE exams. “Even after waiting for 10 years, we are being told that the ‘process’ of regularisation is on. How long will this process continue?” he said. Meritorious School, Amritsar, had a staff strength of 42 but many teachers have either left or been deputed to other departments. With admissions for the new academic session about to begin, the government will publicise the students’ stellar performance in the JEE Mains exam as its own achievement, yet Roop Lal says his demand has gone unheard. Billed as schools set up as “elite” and centres of academic excellence, the meritorious schools have state-of-the-art infrastructure with smart classrooms, science laboratories, technology-enabled learning and sports infrastructure. The residential complex provides students with accommodation and food facilities. Enrolment has increased every year. In the 2024 session, over 500 students got seats in Class XI and XII in Amritsar, with a cut-off of 95%.

In the past few years, 243 students from meritorious schools in the state had qualified for NEET and last year 119 qualified for JEE. Coaching classes for these exams are held free of cost in offline and online mode. The Meritorious Teachers Association of Punjab had staged a protest in February as the cabinet sub-committee meeting to consider the matter of regularisation was postponed and the matter was delayed. Sukhjit Singh, district unit chief of the Meritorious Teachers Association and a teacher at the Meritorious School in Amritsar, said the state government has undermined the position of teachers, who are among the most highly qualified professionals, by keeping them in limbo. “These teachers have trained students who qualified for NEET and JEE. They are still working on meagre salaries and contractual service,” Sukhjit said. Another issue being raised by the meritorious teachers is that the state government is sidelining them for the School of Eminence project. While the SoEs were based on similar grounds, the Meritorious Schools already had the necessary infrastructure to provide quality education at the secondary level.